Systems that provide virtual worlds and/or virtual gaming spaces accessible to a plurality of users for real-time interaction are known. Such systems tend to be implemented with some rigidity with respect to the characteristics of the virtual worlds that they provide. As a result interaction with and/or between a plurality of the virtual worlds and/or virtual gaming spaces tend to be limited.
For example, some virtual worlds are configured such that instances of the virtual worlds manifest characters that are controlled by users accessing the virtual worlds. Controlling a character within a virtual world may provide the primary mechanism through which the user interacts with the virtual world. Due to the relatively rigid, monolithic nature of conventional virtual worlds, it may not be practicable for a character within one virtual world to be enter another virtual world by being manifested within an instance of the virtual world with manifestation characteristics (e.g., appearance, etc.), parameter information (e.g., score, inventory, social connections, etc.), inventory (e.g., objects, currency, etc.), and/or other information that is persistent between the different virtual worlds. Instead, a user may be required to create separate characters within the different virtual worlds.
Conventional video gaming systems exist where a user may create an avatar, or visual representation, that can be expressed within a plurality of different games. For example, the Wii system from Nintendo enables users to create “Miis,” which are digital representations of people that can be expressed within a plurality of different games that are played on the Wii system. However, in the Wii system and/or other similar conventional systems the avatars created and/or obtained by a user are only stored locally on a gaming console where an application that is specific to a game being played is executed. As such, characters cannot be accessed from other consoles or terminals unless a storage device (memory card, hard drive) is physically moved from one console to another; there exists no centralized storage usable by any networked device, including possible applications such as Internet-facing presentation of the character data via a web browser. Further, outside of the visual representation of avatars like Miis, conventional systems enable little to no information related to the avatars to be persistent between different games.